


Tapioca 3: The Return

by Xalts



Series: Tapioca [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Emetophobia, Gen, Psychological Trauma, Where do I begin, just... be thankful the series is over tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 04:49:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5898913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xalts/pseuds/Xalts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part 3 of the Tapioca Series.</p><p>An old face makes a comeback.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tapioca 3: The Return

Salamanders grow at a very fast rate.

As they grow from tadpoles to larvae, they develop their bodies and lungs to the point of no longer needing gills, and lose characteristics such as tail fins while gaining larger mouths, teeth and eyelids. In all, this transition can take anything from a few years to as little as a few days.

This is something John Egbert did not know when he adopted Casey.

This is something he especially did not know when he ‘accidentally’ mated with her, created hybrid abominations, took them to the garbage dump, crushed them with rocks and buried the corpses.

It’s been six weeks since then and John Egbert is still recovering. For a while, he had Casey stay with Jade because he couldn’t even look at her without being reminded of his terrible deeds. But he was getting better. Casey moved back in last week and he’s managed to spend some quality time with her without having horrible visions of his screaming offspring crawling out of the recesses of his mind.

So John Egbert is enjoying his life right now. Or at least, he thinks he is, as he tucks himself up all cosy in bed, ready for a good night’s sleep. He manages to nod off quickly, entering a quiet dreamscape that no longer holds the dazzle of Prospit but still manages to captivate his mind.

When he wakes up at 2am, he doesn’t quite know why. There’s a feeling of unease in his darkened room, and he doesn’t like it. He reaches over to turn the lamp on and immediately recoils as his hand comes in contact with something cold and wet. Bracing himself, he fumbles a little more and turns it on, flooding the room with light, and has to stifle a very small scream when he sees what the cold wet thing was.

It’s tapioca.

There’s a perfect mound of yellow tapioca pudding on his bedside table, just around the base of his lamp. He’s speechless. He thought the tapioca incident was far, far behind him. He quickly looks around his room for the source, but there’s nothing but the shadows that haunt the corners of his ceiling.

Unnerved, he moves to turn the light off again, hoping that the tapioca is just a figment of his imagination, that if he ignores it, it’ll go away, but then the gurgling begins.

Oh, the gurgling! It’s loud, so loud in the silence of the night, and seemingly all-encompassing. John’s ears can’t work out where it’s coming from, it so heavily infects the entire environment. He daren’t get out of bed, daren’t make any sudden movements. He hopes to god he’s imagining this. Maybe it’s a hallucination, a flashback perhaps, a reminder of his sins, but the gurgling doesn’t stop.

A wrinkled hand, pale and bloated like a corpse and dripping with tapioca, worms its way up from under his bed.

He holds back his scream, frozen with terror. There was something in his room. Under his bed. And it was emerging.

A long, pale arm follows the hand, gripping onto John’s sheets, mere centimeters from his body, and with all its strength, it hauls a body after it, huge, with a slightly creamy yellow tinge to its corpse-whiteness. More limbs follow, gangly and unseemly. A torso that drips yellow pudding. It draws itself to full height, cast in dramatic lighting by the table lamp. Its face is dominated by a stretched mouth, lopsided and dribbling, and two eyes like saucepans, unblinking and dark like the void. Clumps of uneven hair are dotted about its scalp like wounds. And from everywhere, from the gaping lips to the empty eyes to the clotted nostrils, it is emitting tapioca which eternally pours forth and flows down its chubby body.

It lifts its fat hand and points one puffy finger at John, who is still motionless in his fear. It opens its mouth in a movement that looks painful.

“ _ Fa… ther… _ ” comes the guttural voice, each syllable bringing forth a new flood of pudding. John feels his gorge rise, but vomit does not come, as if even his bodily functions are paralyzed by abject horror. He isn’t sure if he is even breathing.

With immense effort, he blinks, and swallows, and turns to his child.

“What are you?”   


“ _ I am what you cast aside, _ ” comes the reply. “ _ I am that which you threw away, that you tried to deny, tried to kill. Listen to what you did to me. _ ”

John can do nothing but allow the creature to talk.

“ _ You crushed my brethren because of your shame and left us for dead. We writhed in agony in that hole for hours before death was kind enough to take us. But I was left alone. I suffered at your hands and would suffer further, and I suffer still with the memory. _ ” It pauses for breath, spewing up tapioca with such force that it splatters onto the bed, splashing John’s face. “ _ To survive I had to eat first the tapioca, then the corpses of my brothers lest I lose the strength to live, then more tapioca still. I am cursed with this blighted existence because of you. But I survived and became stronger and now I stand before you, Father, stronger than you. _ ”

“Why?” John finally manages to croak out. The creature leans forwards, towering over him, dripping tapioca from its orifices onto John’s face and body.

The answer is simple, and perhaps predictable.

“ _ Revenge _ .”

Then, without waiting for a reaction, the flood begins. The abomination opens its mouth and tapioca pours forth, more than there has ever been before, coating John with the thick, creamy substance. It’s hot, so hot, like it came from within the salamander-child’s stomach itself, burning with digestive acid, and it scalds John’s skin, burning away his clothes and bedsheets with an audible hiss. The flood is never-ending. John can’t see, can’t breathe; the tapioca is penetrating his skin, crawling up his nose and into his mouth, coating his insides. He loses all sense of time, and sense of self. Nothing matters but tapioca.

It could be minutes and it could be hours, but some time later, the flood stops. John is still paralyzed by his experience, still coated in rapidly-cooling pudding, when he comes to. He coughs up as much tapioca as he can, realising there is still some nestled in his lungs that would probably take a trip to the hospital to remove, and cleans it out of his eyes. Naked but for the pudding covering his body, he rolls out of what remains of his bed and stumbles towards the bathroom.

He doesn’t make it. The creature is still here. It grabs him from behind by the shoulders, throwing him backwards. He’s so off balance that he careens into a wall, breaking his glasses. Bruised and struggling to breathe, he doesn’t notice the child leave and return until he’s being forced into a plastic bin bag.

“Wh-- What are you doing?!” he cries. The tapioca-child smiles down at him.

“ _ Revenge. _ ”

He is forced down into the bag, and once he’s completely in, he feels himself be lifted and jostled around painfully, like the bag is being thrown over the creature’s shoulder. For several minutes, perhaps an hour, he remains in this purgatory of black plastic, with sound muffled by tapioca-filled ears his only clue of where he’s being taken (though he has a sinking feeling he knows) before the bag is dropped heavily and he’s blinded by daylight. Daylight? Has it been that long already?

No time to question it, because now the creature is pushing him into a hole. Oh god. John recognises this place. This is where he did the terrible thing before, where this creature grew up miserably and where he feels like he is probably going to die. His thoughts are confirmed when seconds later, the rocks start. The first one hits his leg, jarring his kneecap painfully and earning a cry of shock that barely finishes before the second comes, this time on his shoulder, and the third, and the fourth, until such a barrage is coming that he cannot separate one from the other. Down the line, one hits him in the head and he’s thankful for the rush of unconsciousness that quickly follows.

That was the last John Egbert ever knew.

Buried in rocks and covered in trash in a landfill where no one would know to look for him, John Egbert died, naked and covered in tapioca, buried in a dirt hole by the offspring he betrayed.

As for the abomination? It catfished John hardcore and no one could tell the difference, though Rose did once admit to Jade that she was sure John didn’t make as many puddings as this in the past.

**Author's Note:**

> please dont ask me to write any more. im begging. this series has aged me 34 years. i cant enjoy a simple pudding any more
> 
> edit: a visual for u https://gyazo.com/11c185981dd0ce24ff6743631781209a


End file.
